More than half of parish still lacks sewers after five years

Naomi KingStaff Writer

Tuesday

Dec 23, 2008 at 3:00 PM

First in a series.

HOUMA — Five years ago, Terrebonne Parish officials approached the idea of providing public sewers.But little has occurred beyond a study on the matter commissioned in 2002.Outside Houma’s city limits, few neighborhoods are hooked up to community sewers. Roughly 48 percent of homes on Terrebonne streets lack sewer service.Creating and establishing a parishwide sewerage system would cost around $256 million and take at least 20 years, according to the study completed in May 2003 by the local T. Baker Smith firm.Mike Ordogne, head of parish Pollution Control, said the project was passed on to federal lawmakers in hopes the federal government could shoulder some of the costs. The proposed vehicle for the work to be authorized was the Water Resource Development Act, or WRDA, the federal legislation that has tied up the Morganza-to-the-Gulf mega-dam project for close to a decade. The work never received authorization through WRDA or money from the federal government.Ordogne said the 2003 study basically updated a 1970s plan for sewers and based the estimate on more current costs. However, private development since then has changed needs enough that a new study, initiated from scratch, could be beneficial, Ordogne said.The parish hasn’t knocked off any of the study’s recommendations since the 2003 study. One attempt to build sewers in the Jarvis community has stalled, but the area’s councilwoman, Arlanda Williams, said she’s going to push for that to move forward again in the next year. When it comes to providing public sewers, issues with property ownership often tie up projects, she said. So new types of sewer treatment should be explored, Williams said. “I think that in 2008, going into 2009, there ought to be something we can do for those people,” she said, referring to citizens without public sewers in Schriever, Gray, Gibson, Johnson Ridge and Donner.The last time the parish government built new sewer service was roughly seven years ago with a community-based treatment plant, which can stand on its own, on Clinton Street in Chauvin. Private subdivisions either turn over their sewer systems to the parish or operate on private plants.“The system has been expanded through developers only,” Ordogne said.The reason nothing has expanded is twofold, he said. The first is that the sewer charges generate only enough money to cover repairs and replacements, not new lines for the aging system. The second is that the two parish-run municipal waste-treatment plants are often near full capacity.The 2003 study says the parish’s North Treatment Plant off St. Louis Canal Road has the capacity to process 16 million gallons per day but operates at 37.5 percent. Meanwhile, the South Treatment Plant, off La. 57 in Ashland, operates at 50 percent of its capacity of 8 million gallons per day, according to the study.Ordogne disagreed with those percentages and said that during rains, the plants process more water because the parish’s drainage pipes leak into the sewer system. For the past five years, he said, Public Works has been identifying and replacing these defective pipes.In June, Parish Councilman Billy Hebert proposed that the parish devise a master sewage plan. At the heart of the plan, he said, is use of the future Westside Boulevard corridor. Sewer lines run from Martin Luther King Boulevard to the North Treatment Plant off St. Louis Canal Road.In November, the Parish Council approved the sale of bonds to pay for $15 million in projects.That included $2.25 million to design and build those sewer improvements in Bayou Cane. “Right now, I’m very pleased we have the funding in place for a major force sewer line from the North Plant to Martin Luther King Boulevard,” Hebert said.Another $2.25 million would go toward designing and building sewer lines in the Woodland Ranch Road industrial area south of Industrial Boulevard.Both those projects will likely need contributions from the private landowners, state grants or other sources to build the lines, Ordogne said.Ordogne said he also has a draft of a request for engineering firms to submit proposals that would look at what the parish’s current needs are and what it would cost to build the expanded sewer system.The study hasn’t been commissioned yet because the parish may do so through expected money from an estimated $130 million in hurricane recovery grants or President-elect Barack Obama’s multi-billion-dollar economic stimulus.

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